Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA)

When preparing your federal grant application, you would do well to put yourself – and your team – in the shoes of the people who will be evaluating it. In this post, we will look specifically at grant opportunities that are evaluated (at least in part) with the aid of a peer review panel (Note: Not all are evaluated in this way).

Whether you are writing an email, blog post, or lengthy proposal, you need to consider the question, “Who is my audience?” In the grants world, your audience will usually be the agency awarding funds and the people reviewing your application.

The process of learning about a grant-making agency is closely related to evaluating mission alignment, so this next installment of the Grant Writing Basics series assumes that (1) your organization’s mission aligns with that of the grant-making agency and that (2) you are actively preparing to write a grant application.

Before anyone can apply for this HHS grant, Trish needs to coordinate the design and posting of the FOA. To allow prospective applicants more time to plan, Trish would also like to publish a grant forecast.

It is easy to be intimidated when you first encounter a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) on Grants.gov.

There are the four tabs of content. The technical language culled from industry and government programs. Application forms, some of which may require file attachments. And, of course, there is the shiver-inducing closing date.

A Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is the publicly available document that contains all the official information (e.g., goals, deadline, eligibility, reporting) about a federal grant. An FOA is how a federal grant-making agency announces the availability of a grant, and it provides instructions on how to apply for that grant.

We heard your feedback, so Release 16.1 on November 20, 2017, will bring improvements to the funding opportunity and communications subscription process.

How? The new Connect tab will contain ways to subscribe to Grants.gov email updates and alerts. After logging in to your Grants.gov account, you can save custom search queries or subscribe to specific funding opportunity numbers.

If you have followed this blog for more than a week, you have heard about Grants.gov Workspace—the standard federal grants application method on Grants.gov.

For those of you federal grant managers out there, you also know how much work goes into developing and posting a funding opportunity announcement (FOA). In addition to all the programmatic and financial information and requirements, there are also the nuts-and-bolts how-to instructions to guide applicants in responding and applying for the grant.

One-Click Saves

Logged-in users will be able to subscribe to a funding opportunity – including forecast, synopsis and package – with a single click on the View Grant Opportunity page. Also, users can save searches from the Search Grants page.